wack game boy zone. there's a small doodle of a game boy above zone

Tag: retrospective

  • Galaga: Destination Earth (2000)

    Galaga: Destination Earth (2000)

    Hey, quick question for Pipe Dream Interactive: why? Why this? Why any of this? Galaga is basically a perfect video game, why would you do this to it? Hasbro was going to approve whatever you turned over, that much was clear, but have you no pride? Failing that, no shame?

    This is a godawful Space Invaders game with a spotty Galaga coat of paint. If it wasn’t for the tractor beams and double ships it would be unrecognizable as Galaga. You still shoot vertically, but the play field scrolls horizontally so you can’t see all the enemies at once, there’s a moderate amount of sprite jitter only when it can do the most harm, the technicolor background jpgs look like shit and are so visually busy that they make it hard to see the bullets, and every time you finish a wave it does a stop/start transition that makes the whole thing just feel awful.

    It’s not even satisfying once you adapt to how rickety it is! If you get a double ship it’s a breeze, if you’re down to a single it’s a Sisyphus reenactment on crutches, and either way you’re going to want to fling yourself down that hill. There’s just no fun to be had here beyond poking fun at its ugly-ass menus and stage transitions. I’m sorry I said Backloggd users don’t actually play games, alright? Y’all got this right on the money, this sucks ass.

    1.5/5

  • Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. (1999)

    Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. (1999)

    1.7? One-point-seven average score on Backloggd, and that’s after my rating??? Do we not actually play the video games we rate on there? When Mario kills a thousand turtles it’s “cute” and “peak” and “formative game design”, but when Acclaim/NEON has you shoot a couple dozen it sucks? Boris Triebel was the director on this, did you think one of the creators of P. P. Hammer and His Pneumatic Weapon suddenly forgot how to make a damn video game?

    A terrible opinion that I earnestly, sincerely hold is that Acclaim was overall a good publisher. Good, not great, but good! Sure they were a license farm for the most part and stuff like Chef’s Luv Shack is indefensible, but a lot of their output represented better attempts at adaptation than most in their heyday could manage. Armorines, though, may as well had been one of their original IPs for all it mattered. Even Valiant doesn’t consider Armorines worth remembering; you have to hit up the Wayback Machine to see it acknowledged on any of their sites. These people want you to remember Bloodshot and they can barely be bothered to add this to their long-ass list?

    Anyway, Acclaim realized the Armorines squabbling with their handlers in D.C. wasn’t going to make for much of a video game and opted to just make Dollar Store Satire-Free Starship Troopers for the 3D consoles. The GBC game developed by NEON took the same tack, but turns it into a top down shooter that’s far better than most on the system. The criticisms I’ve seen of it are that it’s easy to get lost, is annoyingly hard, looks ugly, and repeats itself. I’m here to tell you that exactly one of those is true.

    Armorines GBC sees you playing as an exterminator named Sgt. Snider having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. The escalation of said day is fairly gradual and your power scales to match. At the start of the game you’re using a glorified bug zapper, weak and limited in range. The enemies are similarly tiny, both in size and number. Not the best first impression! Fortunately you get guns fairly quickly, the enemies get more dangerous, and the reasons to complain start to fade. You even get to destroy a few oil derricks midway through! Armorines confirmed based!

    Your inputs are movement, A to shoot with free aim while moving, and B to shoot while strafing. Being able to swap between both is a godsend as several rooms demand that flexibility, though for whatever reason you can’t strafe while aiming diagonally. The last button of note, select, pulls up a reminder of your current objective in case you took a bit too long of a break. Nifty! It’s a simple control scheme without any kind of movement tricks and the gameplay is built around that, opting to gradually increase the difficulty of its combat encounters rather than do too much with level hazards until the late game. There’s even a nice QoL touch where enemies announce their awareness of you with various squawks, even when entirely offscreen, so you almost always get a heads up before things get spicy.

    Environmental interactables only require you to walk into them, so you’re unlikely to miss important items or objectives. This is further assisted by a color palette that makes good use of the GBC, meaning it’s the polar opposite of its 3D counterpart, which loves nothing more than dumping you into the darkest bug-filled caves this side of an Earth Defense Force game. It’s surprisingly easy to parse for a Game Boy game, and I never found myself unsure of how to progress with one exception in the second to last area, which was only because I needed to walk up a cliff and just kind of assumed I couldn’t because it was the same color as the walls. Look, I’m dumb as hell and got through this, you can do it too.

    Odds are if you’re on this website you won’t struggle either. Armorines is honestly pretty easy past like, level 2. I didn’t lose a life until I touched an instant death trap in the last area, and was shocked when the game informed me that I had 11 more banked that I ended up not needing. Health pickups are generous, enemy placements are fair, their respawns are nonexistent for the first 3/4 of the game (in a nice touch they wait until there’s a thematic justification for doing so), and your weapons get crazy powerful by the end. I was a particularly big fan of the short ranged plasma gun and the laser, and the game likes to hand you special weapons for boss encounters so you’ll never be stuck with something that doesn’t work. The greatest sin this game commits in terms of its gameplay is having a fairly weak spread gun, but you’ll make do. My only piece of advice is to break out the Ghouls & Ghosts tactics and skip picking up the lightning gun whenever it shows up, that thing never gets meaningfully better.

    The only notable criticism I have for this is fairly obvious – all you’re ever really doing is moving through levels and shooting guys to secure the prize. I’d be more annoyed if the areas weren’t varied or if the game wasn’t so short. We’re talking a couple hours tops here, and while they aren’t amazing or anything they’re hardly dull unless you just don’t like the gameplay in its own right. If this came out on the NES it’d be heralded as a “hidden gem” on every retro YouTube channel, but instead it was a Game Boy game with an Acclaim logo, which means it can’t possibly be good, right guys? Like and subscribe so you won’t miss when your next opinion arrives!

    I will always advocate for playing games past the first level. First impressions aren’t everything, especially when you’re sampling seemingly-infinite roms for games that were meant to be stuck with, not taste-tested back to back. I just wanted to play an action game a bit better than Annihilator – imagine my shock when I was actually having fun! There’s a very real chance this is the best piece of Armorines media that’s ever existed, and you know now that I say that, maybe Valiant was right to chuck it into the memory hole.

    …seriously though, Acclaim released some of the best games of the era. All the Turoks are good, even Rage Wars, and Shadow Man is better than Ocarina! I’m not afraid to say it! Fuck you, nostalgia police! Re-Volt is better than Mario Kart 64! I liked Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls! Get your hands off me, you pigs! Just wait until I tell you how South Park Rally isn’t even a bad game! AIIIIIIIEEEE!

    3.5/5

  • Kirby’s Block Ball (1995)

    Kirby’s Block Ball (1995)

    You mind a personal intro? Actually, fuck it, I’m just gonna. This one’s already entirely self indulgent anyway.

    I’m planning a move. The farthest I’ve ever done, in fact. Lotta anxieties around that, lemme tell you! One opportunity this avails me is a chance to trim my belongings down, which includes my game collection. Don’t feel bad for me – I genuinely see this as a positive! I’m absolutely not a minimalist, but I am one of those weirdos whose mental state deteriorates proportionally with clutter. As I picked through my stuff playing “should it stay or should it go” I got to my GB/GBA carts, a pre-trimmed collection I wasn’t planning on reducing given that it all fits in a tiny container, but I picked through ’em anyway and locked eyes with Kirby for the umpteenth time. Yeah, sure, why not.

    Kirby’s Block Ball was the first video game I ever owned. Not played, but owned, mine. We didn’t have a lot of money when I was a kid but my fascination with friends’ systems combined with 90’s purchasing power eventually saw my Mom and me heading to a Target with intent, then walking out with a Game Boy Pocket bundle. She scouted that deal like a hawk and I was absolutely not going to complain regardless of the included cart; video games were the sickest shit ever and now I was going to have one! And my system was red!!!

    I feel like in hindsight she probably realized a Game Boy was the wrong choice from a financial perspective. Sure a home console would have cost more up front, but the money we saved on batteries would have paid for college. Sorry mom!

    Little me eventually got Mario Land 2 and was gifted some other carts here and there, but Kirby’s Block Ball always remained a favorite. I’d go back to it to chase high scores, or do that weird child thing where you fixate on a very small piece of an overall package, which in my case meant finding a level that allowed me to trigger the Air Hockey minigame as quickly as possible and 3-0ing that thing over and over again. I wonder if it explains a lot about my tastes and tendencies. Of course my long-term entry point was a weird-ass spinoff nobody played. I was always going to be this way.

    As an adult with critical faculties who’s played thousands upon thousands of games and even occasionally gotten paid to do so, my relationship with the medium has changed. I’ve had my sentimentality burnt off by sheer exposure, my enthusiasm for games remaining just as intense, but manifesting in an entirely different way. I am fully capable of separating myself from my experience and evaluating the game in front of me, I swear. Watch!

    Kirby’s Block Ball is more clever than it is good. It’s a wildly innovative take on Breakout and its ilk, with Kirby’s transformations allowing for significantly more finesse and the stages feeling almost more like puzzles than the traditional walls’o’bricks, but its refusal to layer its ideas until the final world limits its replayability and to some extent its appeal. It almost feels distrustful of the player (which to be fair was likely to be a literal child so that may have been warranted) and their ability to retain all of the mechanics, so it almost never asks that you utilize more than one at a time. Combine this with slow ball speed and stages that trap your ball inside unbreakable blocks, and you’ll often find yourself watching the game play itself as you think about how you could do it better.

    …ok but also, like, this game is sick as fuck sometimes? The powerups are mostly movement-based but the Needle in particular letting you stick yourself back on a paddle to re-aim? OH my god. In keeping with Kirby as a franchise the bosses are hardly a challenge, but I really like how their attacks can shrink your paddles down to a single star, with all the ball control and defensive issues that implies. I like the “border line” par scores you need to achieve on each level in order to get to Dedede, and how that final gauntlet does ask you to tie everything you learned together for the most part. They demand you fully master each area as you need to generate as many extra lives as possible so you can convert them to points at the end. Neat! Really, genuinely neat! I’m doing the Marge potato meme with the cart right now, you gotta believe me.

    In many ways I believe nostalgia to be a poison. If you’re constantly looking backwards, the best case scenario is that you’ll stay where you are. I’m especially distrustful of anyone who’s overly engaged in the “retro” hustle. No amount of money or time can buy your childhood back. We need to be willing to have new experiences, take risks, push yourself to become someone better. I don’t go so far as some and say that people experiencing this yearning are fashy “retvrn” types or anything, that’s incredibly uncharitable towards most folks, but I do feel pity. Surrounding yourself with artifacts, the toys you had or maybe wish you had, will stunt and barricade you more than support you. Injection molded plastic makes for a poor foundation.

    The thing is, these old games? They hold up in their own way, even when they aren’t great. It helps that they were designed to just be games, not lifelong commitments with complex monetization schemes beyond what to set the MSRP to on a retail shelf. The state of contemporary gaming is sickening, dog. I hate that if I turn my Switch on the first thing I’ll see is an advertisement. I walk past the Xbox in the living room that we basically only use for movies and am reminded that Microsoft is actively committing war crimes right now. I hop on my PC to play my beloved indies and some bigass multiplayer mess is trying its damnedest to squeeze money and attention out of me, uneven value prop be damned. I didn’t ask for any of this shit. I don’t want any of this shit. This industry is unfathomably ass. I just want to immerse myself in someone’s interactive world, to dissect their ideas, to see what they wanted me to see, to play, and to come out of it with something to talk about. Instead I’m surrounded by clutter, only it’s against my will and I’m not allowed to clean it.

    The Game Boy is a toy. It was designed by a toy company so they could sell more toys compatible with it. It was relatively complex from an engineering perspective, but as a user it couldn’t be much simpler: a d-pad, a few buttons, a slot to pop a game into, and a power switch to fire it up. You play until you flick that the other way or run out of battery, then you go about your day, hopefully a bit happier for having had the experience and maybe willing to try more carts. It was still transparently transactional, but it was only as invasive as you allowed it to be. When I turn Kirby’s Block Ball off and put it back in the box where I keep these old things, I will not receive push notifications enticing me to pick it back up. If I choose to it will only be because I have genuine interest in doing so.

    I like that. I like being able to say “when”, and I don’t know that I fully realized how much I missed it. I want to retain that agency over my attention, even if it means I get some funny looks or miss out on the flavor of the month. I want to choose anticipation over trepidation.

    Also, god damn this game’s music goes so hard. Have you heard this boss theme? Do you have any idea how hard I popped off when they finally acknowledged its existence again??? I didn’t even play Kirby Fall Guys or whatever, but if you give me slap bass this good I will always bob my head on beat approvingly.

    I’m not giving this one a rating.

  • What? Why? Why this? Why the Game Boy?

    What? Why? Why this? Why the Game Boy?

    In short: because I’m a fan of taking an incredibly stupid endeavor extremely seriously.

    In long: because I’m a fan of taking an incredibly stupid endeavor extremely seriously, and I think the Game Boy is a uniquely interesting platform for this kind of sort-of-impossible project.

    Look, I am aware of how many games exist on the DMG, Game Boy Color, and so on. Loosely. It’s a whole heck of a lot, and funnily enough the number isn’t even entirely agreed upon*! Trying to play every Game Boy game – and I mean all of ’em! – just isn’t realistic. It’s arguably not even possible!

    What I do intend to do is use this site as a place to put a whole lot of games writing focused on a single, central concept. I’ve been at this thing for a while, and am actively at it elsewhere for games that are typically a bit bigger than 160×144, but I keep finding myself overwhelmed with the state of the modern games industry and marketplace. My Kirby’s Block Ball piece kind of elaborates on that, among other things.

    I like the Game Boy. I like that it’s wholly disconnected from the Internet Gamer Experience that makes my brain hurt. I like that indies are developing for it and that it’s easier than ever to get into the platform no matter what devices you have access to. Most of them are even backlit! Sick!

    So what I’m gonna do is play as many of these things as I can, see, then I’m gonna rank ’em. With all due respect to Jeff Gerstmann’s established scientific convention, I don’t think the touch’n’rank methodology is gonna cut it. Unless stated otherwise every game featured on here is gonna be completed. We’re keeping it super lean too: title image, text, done. I am not going to pay WordPress extra money just to store all my screenshots when I can do that myself, for free.

    This site will run as long as it stays fun to do so. Its entries will be on the short side, as the games tend to be. There will not be a schedule, because this is entirely based on my own personal interests, whims, and free time. If you have a Game Boy game you want me to play, you are more than welcome to tell me so in the comments or via wackgameboyzone at gmail! I promise nothing!**

    With apologies to Gunpei Yokoi, welcome to the Wack Game Boy Zone.

    *Backloggd is not a real source of anything beyond fun writing, but I wanted a third link for the bit.

    **Unless you send me a review copy of something new and I accept it, of course. This may not be a professional website, but I am still unfortunately a professional.